Corrupt Exchanges: Actors, Resources, and Mechanisms of Political Corruption

Political corruption has traditionally been presented as a phenomenon characteristic of developing countries, authoritarian regimes, or societies in which the value system favored tacit patrimony and clientelism. Recently, however, the thesis of an inverse correlation between corruption and economic and political development has been convincingly challenged. Countries with a long democratic tradition, such as the United States, Belgium, Britain, and Italy, have all experienced a combination of headline-grabbing scandals and smaller-scale cases of misappropriation. In Corrupt Exchanges, research on Italian cases is used to develop a model to analyze corruption as a network of illegal exchanges. The book will serve both as a theoretical approach to a political problem of large bearing on democratic institutions and a descriptive warning of a system in peril.

Donatella della Porta is professor of local government on the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Florence.